5,096 research outputs found
A blockchain-based Decentralized System for proper handling of temporary Employment contracts
Temporary work is an employment situation useful and suitable in all
occasions in which business needs to adjust more easily and quickly to workload
fluctuations or maintain staffing flexibility. Temporary workers play therefore
an important role in many companies, but this kind of activity is subject to a
special form of legal protections and many aspects and risks must be taken into
account both employers and employees. In this work we propose a
blockchain-based system that aims to ensure respect for the rights for all
actors involved in a temporary employment, in order to provide employees with
the fair and legal remuneration (including taxes) of work performances and a
protection in the case employer becomes insolvent. At the same time, our system
wants to assist the employer in processing contracts with a fully automated and
fast procedure. To resolve these problems we propose the D-ES (Decentralized
Employment System). We first model the employment relationship as a state
system. Then we describe the enabling technology that makes us able to realize
the D-ES. In facts, we propose the implementation of a DLT (Decentralized
Ledger Technology) based system, consisting in a blockchain system and of a
web-based environment. Thanks the decentralized application platforms that
makes us able to develop smart contracts, we define a discrete event control
system that works inside the blockchain. In addition, we discuss the temporary
work in agriculture as a interesting case of study.Comment: Accepted for publication in the proceedings of the "Computing
Conference 2018" - 10-12 July 2018 - London, United Kingdo
A Petri Nets Model for Blockchain Analysis
A Blockchain is a global shared infrastructure where cryptocurrency
transactions among addresses are recorded, validated and made publicly
available in a peer- to-peer network. To date the best known and important
cryptocurrency is the bitcoin. In this paper we focus on this cryptocurrency
and in particular on the modeling of the Bitcoin Blockchain by using the Petri
Nets formalism. The proposed model allows us to quickly collect information
about identities owning Bitcoin addresses and to recover measures and
statistics on the Bitcoin network. By exploiting algebraic formalism, we
reconstructed an Entities network associated to Blockchain transactions
gathering together Bitcoin addresses into the single entity holding permits to
manage Bitcoins held by those addresses. The model allows also to identify a
set of behaviours typical of Bitcoin owners, like that of using an address only
once, and to reconstruct chains for this behaviour together with the rate of
firing. Our model is highly flexible and can easily be adapted to include
different features of the Bitcoin crypto-currency system
Recognition and Res Judicata of US class action judgments in European legal systems
Class actions, which allow individual plaintiffs to represent a group of others in a similar situation in a claim against a same defendant, are still a specificity of US law. Recently, transnational class actions, either against a foreign defendant or including foreign class members, have become popular. The author addresses the possibility of bringing such claims involving parties that are residents of a European country. The United States, traditionally known for the extraterritorial application of their laws and for easily retaining jurisdiction of their courts, are trying to coordinate the legal systems involved by being concerned with the possibility of recognition in a foreign country of class action judgments. Therefore, the original issue needs to be addressed of the recognition and the res judicata effect of these judgments in European countries that do not know similar collective judicial procedures
Analysis of heat kernel highlights the strongly modular and heat-preserving structure of proteins
In this paper, we study the structure and dynamical properties of protein
contact networks with respect to other biological networks, together with
simulated archetypal models acting as probes. We consider both classical
topological descriptors, such as the modularity and statistics of the shortest
paths, and different interpretations in terms of diffusion provided by the
discrete heat kernel, which is elaborated from the normalized graph Laplacians.
A principal component analysis shows high discrimination among the network
types, either by considering the topological and heat kernel based vector
characterizations. Furthermore, a canonical correlation analysis demonstrates
the strong agreement among those two characterizations, providing thus an
important justification in terms of interpretability for the heat kernel.
Finally, and most importantly, the focused analysis of the heat kernel provides
a way to yield insights on the fact that proteins have to satisfy specific
structural design constraints that the other considered networks do not need to
obey. Notably, the heat trace decay of an ensemble of varying-size proteins
denotes subdiffusion, a peculiar property of proteins
Tactile sensing chips with POSFET array and integrated interface electronics
This work presents the advanced version of novel POSFET (Piezoelectric Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor) devices based tactile sensing chip. The new version of the tactile sensing chip presented here comprises of a 4 x 4 array of POSFET touch sensing devices and integrated interface electronics (i.e. multiplexers, high compliance current sinks and voltage output buffers). The chip also includes four temperature diodes for the measurement of contact temperature. Various components on the chip have been characterized systematically and the overall operation of the tactile sensing system has been evaluated. With new design the POSFET devices have improved performance (i.e. linear response in the dynamic contact forces range of 0.01–3N and sensitivity (without amplification) of 102.4 mV/N), which is more than twice the performance of their previous implementations. The integrated interface electronics result in reduced interconnections which otherwise would be needed to connect the POSFET array with off-chip interface electronic circuitry. This research paves the way for CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) implementation of full on-chip tactile sensing systems based on POSFETs
Memory-Efficient Graph Convolutional Networks for Object Classification and Detection with Event Cameras
Recent advances in event camera research emphasize processing data in its
original sparse form, which allows the use of its unique features such as high
temporal resolution, high dynamic range, low latency, and resistance to image
blur. One promising approach for analyzing event data is through graph
convolutional networks (GCNs). However, current research in this domain
primarily focuses on optimizing computational costs, neglecting the associated
memory costs. In this paper, we consider both factors together in order to
achieve satisfying results and relatively low model complexity. For this
purpose, we performed a comparative analysis of different graph convolution
operations, considering factors such as execution time, the number of trainable
model parameters, data format requirements, and training outcomes. Our results
show a 450-fold reduction in the number of parameters for the feature
extraction module and a 4.5-fold reduction in the size of the data
representation while maintaining a classification accuracy of 52.3%, which is
6.3% higher compared to the operation used in state-of-the-art approaches. To
further evaluate performance, we implemented the object detection architecture
and evaluated its performance on the N-Caltech101 dataset. The results showed
an accuracy of 53.7 % [email protected] and reached an execution rate of 82 graphs per
second.Comment: Accepted for the SPA 2023 conferenc
La obsolescencia de la ciudad turÃstica. Propuesta de actuación en el área turÃstica consolidada de Gandia.
[ES] Este trabajo propone analizar la obsolescencia urbana centrada, de forma particular, en el sector turÃstico. Dicho análisis detecta sÃntomas bastante claros de decadencia, expresados en la bajada de calidad en el sector, en la menor economÃa generada por el mismo, y los problemas urbanÃsticos generados como consecuencia de una mala planificación previa, y de las problemáticas urbanÃsticas generadas por la falta de una verdadera conexión entre ciudad, establecimiento turÃstico, territorio y población
La obsolescencia urbana se puede definir como una ¿patologÃa¿, que se manifiesta con el paso del tiempo, como el en el ciclo de vida de una persona. Esta va a afectar la ciudad tanto de manera fÃsica, expresada con el deterioro de edificios y en mayor escala en las zonas urbanas, en lo social generando de esta manera un fenómeno de segregación y el incremento de la exclusión social, criminalidad etc. De forma resumida la obsolescencia urbana crea unas situaciones de desconfianza y desequilibrio de una buena parte de la población local en relación a los lugares afectados, generando divisiones sociales, ambientales y económicas.
En el ámbito turÃstico, al igual que en la ciudad residencial, el envejecimiento y la obsolescencia de los espacios urbanos demandan soluciones que garantices el mantenimiento y, posiblemente el incremento de su competitividad. Esta necesidad de solucionar dicho problema se ha visto reflejado a través de las lÃneas de polÃticas públicas de los últimos años, actuándose concretamente con planes estratégicos y de mejorÃa de los sectores tradicionalmente turÃsticos en el panorama nacional.
Este trabajo se ocupa de realizar una búsqueda de las causas principales al problema de la obsolescencia turÃstica en el caso concreto de la ciudad turÃstica de GandÃa (España), y buscar unas posibles soluciones, basándose en casos estudio ya existentes. Finaliza el trabajo con una propuesta concreta de desarrollo de un proyecto que trata de dar una respuesta efectiva a dicha situación de declive tanto fÃsico, como económico y social.[EN] The aim of this work is to analize the problem of urban obsolescence, with a particular focus on the turism sector. This analysis studies some claire sintoms of such decadence as the lowering of quality in the sector, the less economy that it generates, and the urbanistic problems caused by a lack of previous planification and all those problem based on an non-existent dialogue between the city, the tourism establishment, the territory and the people.
The urban obsolescence can be defined as a proper ¿patology¿ that shows up as time passes, just like in a normal person lifetime. It affects the city either in a physic way, with the degradation of buildings or , in a wider view, of entire urban areas, or social way creating the segregation phenomenon and an increasing of social exclusion, criminality ando so on. Summing up the urban obsolescence creates mistrust and imbalance situations for a big part of the local population towards the degraded areas, generating social, enviromental and economic divisions.
In the tourism sphere, as it happens in the residential part of the city, is expressed the necessity of answers and solutions for the degradation and aging of urban areas, that may possibly bring to an increasement of its competitivity. The need of solving this problem is expressed also by the latest guide-lines of public politics that ,in the last years, concretely adopted several improvement plans of the famous tourism sectors in the national panorama.
Thus ,this work deal with the research of the main causes of the problem of touristic obsolescence , in the specific case of the touristic city of Gandìa (Spain), and to find possibles solutions to it starting from exsisting studies.
In conclusion, is proposed, in this work, an effective proposition of development of the project in order to give a possible solution to such an econimic, Physic and social problem.Pinna, A. (2021). La obsolescencia de la ciudad turÃstica. Propuesta de actuación en el área turÃstica consolidada de Gandia. Universitat Politècnica de València. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/167938TFG
Simulation and identification of gene regulatory networks
Gene regulatory networks are a well-established model to represent the functioning, at gene level, of utterly elaborated biological networks. Studying and understanding such models of gene communication might enable researchers to rightly address costly laboratory experiments,
e.g. by selecting a small set of genes deemed to be responsible for a particular disease, or by indicating with confidence which molecule is supposed to be susceptible to
certain drug treatments. This thesis explores two main aspects regarding gene regulatory networks: (i) the simulation of realistic perturbative and systems genetics experiments in gene networks, and (ii) the inference of gene networks from simulated and real data measurements. In detail, the following themes will be discussed: (i) SysGenSIM, an open source software to produce gene
networks with realistic topology and simulate systems genetics or targeted perturbative experiments;
(ii) two state of the arts algorithms for the structural identification of gene networks from single-gene knockout measurements; (iii) an approach to reverse-engineering
gene networks from heterogeneous compendia; (iv) a methodology to infer gene interactions fromsystems genetics dataset. These works have been positively recognized by the scientific community. In particular, SysGenSIM has been used – in addition to providing valuable test benches for the development of the above inference algorithms – to generate benchmark datasets for international
competitions as the DREAM5 Systems Genetics challenge and the StatSeq workshop.
The identificationmethodologies earned their worth by accurately reverse-engineering gene
networks at established contests, namely the DREAM Network Inference challenges. Results are explained and discussed thoroughly in the thesis
Effect of different pastures on CLA content in milk and sheep cheese
It is known that milk composition included conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) is affected by animal feeding system (Cabiddu et al., 2001). In Sardinia dairy sheep feeding is mainly based on pastures. Most of them are characterised by self-regenerating species, like annual ryegrass (Lolium rigidum Gaudin) and burr medic (Medicago polymorpha L.). Non conventional species belonging to the Compositae family such as (Chrysanthemum coronarium L.) seem interesting for sheep feeding when other herbages decrease in quality (late spring- early summer). It was observed that C. coronarium establishes rapidly, can be grazed early in the growing season and persist where other pasture species
may disappear; for these reasons it can be considered a valuable source of food. Moreover a preliminary
study with dairy sheep fed fresh forage of C. coronarium showed relatively high levels of CLA in milk
(Molle G. pers. com.) The aim of the present work was to study the influence of different pastures on milk composition, with particular reference to CLA and its precursors
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